In mobile communication networks, there is always a challenge to obtain good performance and capacity for a given communications protocol, its parameters and the physical environment in which the mobile communication network is deployed.
Beyond the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard for telecommunications and the LTE advanced standard for telecommunications, standardization bodies such as the third generation partnership project (3GPP) have no concrete plans in place to push through new global standards for telecommunications. For the foreseeable future, evolution of wireless and mobile access is therefore more likely to evolve around recycling and combinations of already standardized and known technologies. A couple of examples are to either run LTE over micro- or millimeter wave bands, or to put parts of a WiFi network under the control of a LTE core network. An example of this is the concept of multipath Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) transmission, where a user equipment (UE) is able to make use of two types of radio access technologies simultaneously, e.g. WiFi and LTE, for one regular TCP session.
Currently, LTE provides connectivity services via EPS (Evolved Packet Service) bearer(s) between a UE and a Packet Data Network Gateway (PGW). EPS bearers may be regarded as the fundamental connectivity service that LTE networks provide to their users. The PGW then provides access to services in the Internet domain or other, including the Internet Protocol (IP) Multimedia Subsystem (IMS).
In the network up to the Serving Gateway (SGW), the bearers from a particular UE are treated as a monolith, all to be routed to the same SGW and controlled the same way in the transport domain. This current handling of EPS bearers makes sense from a scalability and complexity standpoint, for example to handle a large number, such as millions, of simultaneous EPS bearers provided to large numbers of UEs in a network. Further, the scalability of the EPS bearers implies inflexibility at the edges of the LTE radio access networks, since the EPS bearers must be bookended according to specific requirements, most notably via nodes in the core parts of the networks, e.g., at the SGW and PGW.
Hence, there is a need for an improved bearer handling in communications networks.